Greetings from Lebanon! I’ve left the relative calm oasis of Jordan and landed in loud, fast paced, chaotic Beirut. The very first thing I noticed about this place is that the Lebanese are hands down the most insane drivers in the world. No joke! The taxi ride from the airport to my hotel was absolutely terrifying. It’s gas all the way to the floor or brake all the way to the floor, weaving around everyone and everything, and three times…
Up with the sun, I left Wadi Musa in a car with a nice Czech couple to Wadi Rum about an hour and a half away. When people talk about the Arabian desert, this is usually the place they’re talking about. It’s arid, sandy, and hot, the Bedouin people have been living and thriving here for thousands of years, this was the home and stomping grounds of TE Lawrence of Arabia during the Arab revolts in the early 20th century,…
After an easy ride from Feynan, provided by my hotel, I landed in the town of Wadi Musa, a town that apparently was largely built up only due to it’s proximity to Petra. Lots of hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, tour buses, selfie sticks, you get the idea. My head was still pounding from my hikes in Dana and Feynan so I pretty much went straight to bed and slept all day and through the night after taking some “Jordanian herbs”…
Getting out of Karak turned out to be a bit of an odyssey. Luckily it worked out, but it took most of the day, a lot longer than expected. I was supposed to take a bus from Karak to Tafilah and transfer to a bus to Dana. For some reason there were no buses to Tafilah from Karak that day, so instead, a couple of locals told me the best way to get there and the odyssey began. First a…
As I said in my previous post, Karak is just a quick one night stop for me on my way south. I woke up early in Madaba and had to first take a bus back to Amman and then transfer to a bus heading to Karak. It was all fairly easy to accomplish, though I get strange looks and genuine confusion from locals when they find out I want to take the bus instead of paying a small fortune for…
A couple of easy buses from Irbid and now I’m in Madaba, just a bit southwest from Amman. Madaba is a fairly quiet town and has the largest population of Christians in Jordan. That’s not to say the Muslims don’t have a presence though. Every morning the Imam’s call to prayer can be heard everywhere as in most towns, but here it’s immediately followed by the ringing of the church bells. Most of the sites and cities throughout the region,…
After about an hour and a half bus ride from Ajlun, I based myself in the university town of Irbid to the north. Irbid is a very busy and bustling city, the second largest in Jordan, and it never seems to stop. There’s very little here to interest the tourists, but it makes for a great base to explore some more Roman ruins here in the northern part of the country. I’ve noticed that most of the tourists seem to…
A short bus ride to the northwest takes me to the village of Ajlun, nestled in some hills surrounded by pine and olive groves. Beautiful! Ajlun really has only one attraction, a huge castle on the highest hilltop, Mt Auf. It was built in the 12th century to defend against Christian crusaders and apparently saw a lot of action. You can see everything from up there. It’s definitely one of the better castles I’ve been to in my travels. And…
Time just seems to fly by because another three month work assignment has ended and I’m already back to wandering the globe. This time I decided to explore some of the middle east, beginning in the capitol city of the kingdom of Jordan. It was called Philadelphia for much of it’s history and in the bible it’s referred to as Rabbath, but nowadays it’s Amman. It’s been a prominent hub of trade for thousands of years and consequently, conquered and…
I left Jeonju on a morning train bound for the capitol city of Seoul, where I started this adventure several weeks ago. I really underestimated how much there was to see and do here so I decided to spend a few days seeing the things I’d missed the first time before heading home. Also, many of the places I visited this time were way out on the outskirts of the city which allowed for a much more relaxed pace. To…